To have a document or web page that is scripted in another language, one has to seek the help of a translation service. There are numerous websites that offer translations including Google translate it self, which does the job for free. But there are drawbacks to seeking the use of Google translate. Primarily, Google translate is a machine translator. It is not operated by a person. One enters the text that one wants to be translated and it provides a translation in the language that one chooses. The problem with this procedure is that, it may not be an entirely accurate translation.

It is sufficient for one to be able to grasp a general understanding of the given content, but will not be able to provide a contextual explanation. A professional translator will be able to translate any document irrespective of the context. It could be a medical document, legal document or a scientific research paper. Such papers which demand high language skills cannot be suitably translated without excellent knowledge of the fields and the accurate terminology used in those fields in each language. Such a skill set is only provided by professional translators.

Having wrong translations can cause improper judgements. If it were a medical document, a person’s life could depend on the translation service provided. It is in such scenarios that professional translator services provide the edge with accurate contextual translations. Free translation services like Google translate have limited language ability. The vocabulary is limited and the number of languages available is also limited. Hence a person who has an academic document that uses a number of words that are not used commonly will not be translated accurately on such services.

There are numerous dialects and languages in the world that are not of international prominence, yet have a considerable section of people speaking them. When customers require such unique language translations, only professional translators will be able to provide a person who is skilled in that language. Professional translators use people for translation who will keep contact with the client, understand his requirements completely and then proceed with the job. This allows for one to obtain high quality translations with the least errors from professional translation services.

In the previous part of the article we discussed what machine translation is and here we continue our discussion on the limitations of machine or automatic translation.

Even the most sophisticated software cannot substitute the skill of a professional translator. The reasons why machine translations are not as satisfactory as human translation are many. Ambiguity in translation is the result of one word having many meanings depending on the context. Disambiguation involves use of either shallow approach that uses statistical techniques to remove ambiguity or the deeper approach that involves comprehensive knowledge of a word. The former still leaves scope for translation error while the latter is difficult to implement in practice.

Machine translation can never be a substitute for human translation because a language can be used for non communication reasons like expressing emotions, demonstrating one’s class status, telling jokes, expressing non hostile intent with strangers etc. There is often intentional or accidental ambiguity when communicating with others also referred to as ‘telling lies’. These reasons can never be satisfactorily expressed through machine translations.

Cross cultural concerns increase further the complexity of translations and there is no universal structure for handling them as the culture of people varies widely from one region to another. The mathematical theory of sets suggests that computers can never fully overtake language. According to it no subset can be larger than the set of which it is a part. This tends to place language and translation outside the limits of solvable problems and into the realm of the intractable.

No matter how fast a computer functions, the real problem in translation is not electronic but one of linguistics. It is hard to adequately represent through models the vast array of interconnections between the words of a single language and also the target language and correctly and completely map all the interconnections between them. It is impossible to make the correct choice between competing terms in a great majority of cases. Linguists have been raking their brains for many years without arriving at a satisfactory solution to this problem so far.

As far as accuracy of machine translation is concerned, any claim can be misleading as there is no perfect way of quantifying accuracy. A language can be graded as perfect English, minimally acceptable English and so on and these are subjective and can not be quantified easily. Also even those machine translations that claim 90% accuracy will have one error in every line!

Any work of high or even medium literary value requires human translation to maintain quality. The presumption that machine translation is less expensive than human translation is questionable when one considers the overall cost of maintaining large mainframe systems and also the human post editing required to attain desired quality levels.

To conclude, machine translation can only assist in improving the translator’s productivity by increasing translation speed and overall translation quality and cannot be by itself a substitute for quality human translation.

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One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Expert Translation service on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.

Automatic or machine translation is the use of state of the art technology for translation of a text from one natural language to another without the intervention of human beings. With the advent of digital computers, it usually refers to using software tools that carry out the translation.

The translation process is an inherently complex one and not easily amenable to automation. Translation is not a mere word-for-word substitution. The translator must interpret and analyze all the words in the text and know how each word / sentence influences another. One of the earliest attempts at machine translation is the Georgetown experiment in 1954 that involved automatic translation of over 60 sentences in Russian into English. Since then a lot of funding has gone into machine translation research with limited success.

The translation process basically involves decoding the meaning of the source text and encoding it in the target language. This apparently simple procedure involves complex cognitive operation. Decoding the meaning involves interpretation and analysis of all the features of the source text that requires the translator to know the grammar, syntax, idioms, semantics etc. of the source language and also the culture of the speakers. The latter is particularly difficult to incorporate in any automatic process. The translator needs to have the same in depth knowledge in the target language for encoding the meaning in it.

Thus the machine translation has to “understand” the source language in the same way as the translator and “create” new text in the target language just like a human being. There are basically two approaches to machine or automatic translation – rule based and statistical.

Rule based automatic translation involves building several linguistic rules and use of many bilingual dictionaries for each language pair. It uses several concepts like transfer-based machine translation, dictionary-based machine translation and

inter-lingual machine translation. Transfer based machine translation can be further divided into batch and interactive systems. As the name suggests, a batch system outputs the entire text at one go while the interactive system waits for human intervention to choose the best word.

The software using rule based translation parses the source text and creates an intermediate representation of it using large set of rules and morphological, semantic and syntactic information. It is then transferred into the target language using its grammatical structure. The process can be refined by the user by adding appropriate terminology.

Statistical machine translation generates translations using statistical techniques. Billions of words of text in the source and target languages along with examples human translations are fed into a computer. A translation model is developed using statistical learning techniques that improve the quality of translation as the translation progresses.

Both the approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. While rule based approach provides consistent and predictable translation quality, statistical method provides for rapid and cost effective development.

There is a third approach to machine translation which is hybrid machine translation that exploits the strengths of both rule based and statistical methodologies. Development of a translator using any of the three approaches is very time consuming and expensive. The translation software needs to be upgraded with constant human intervention for quality improvement. The latter is a continuous process and can take long time.

The next part of the article discusses the limitations of machine translation.

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One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Expert Translation service on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.

In general, the art of translation and translation services don’t just depend on word-for-word replacement of a source language text with a target language equivalent. If that were the case, then human translation would be rendered obsolete by machine translation. At the moment though, all professional translation is best done with human translation and the occasional machine translation service.

The Shortcomings of Machine Translation

To illustrate, a computer translation assistant once automatically translated an article about the former First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush, in French. Although computer translators are programmed to discern certain expressions and figures of speech, each and every instance of “Laura Bush” found in the article ended up being translated as “le buisson de Laura”. More to the point, “Bush” was transliterated by the machine as a noun instead of a family name, and “buisson” is incidentally French slang for “vagina” to boot.

As long as automatic machine translators lack self-awareness or insight equal to that of a normal human being, human translation will always be needed. At any rate, let’s now take a good look at what a high-grade, topnotch professional translation really looks like. To reiterate, it’s important to view a translator as an expert craftsman; a linguist, a specialist, and a wordsmith all-in-one multiplied by two or more different languages.

The Advantages of Human Translation

Even though translators can hardly be compared to, say, writers or journalists when it comes to making stories and articles from scratch, they are still considered experts in their field because of the way they hone a source text to fit a certain audience. In those terms, translators can be compared to editors who constantly shape, mold, and perfect a written piece for better public consumption.

To illustrate, here’s the typical way a translator goes about his business: Once he has finishes a draft of his translation, he’ll check whether or not his work contains any inconsistencies, misunderstandings, gaffes, and the like via constant and deliberate proofreading. From there, the translator will rewrite his proofread outline so that it will hide the translation marks. Being able to do so will help make the end product seem less like the result of a translation service and more like an original document.

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One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Expert Translation service on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.